What employers say about AI in job interviews

Four findings

1. 13 of 14

   Live interviews are closed to AI

   8 employers prohibit it outright and 5 unless the interviewer says it is part of the exercise. Thoughtworks is the only one that allows it and it expects candidates to judge the output critically.

2. 13.5%

   Most employers publish nothing

   41 of 303 repeat a statement about AI in hiring across their postings (95% interval 10.1 to 17.8%). For the rest, the posting is silent.

3. 25 of 41

   More employers describe their own AI use than set rules for you

   Only 15 set rules for candidates. The most common use employers describe is screening or assessing applications.

4. 3 of 15

   Employers record interviews and some forbid you to

   6 employers record or transcribe interviews with AI. 3 of the 15 that set rules for candidates (Fastly, Thoughtworks and Toast) prohibit candidates from using their own recording tools.

The data, employer by employer

Each quote is the employer's own wording, checked by script against the stored text. Open a row to read it and follow the source.

Common questions

Method

1. 1.Collect

   On November 1, 2026 we read the public job-board APIs that employers expose for embedding their listings: Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby. We kept counts and the sentences that mention both AI and hiring. Postings are deduplicated by company, normalised title and text length.

2. 2.Choose the unit

   The unit is the employer, not the posting, so one employer with 400 identical postings counts once. Boards with fewer than 5 unique postings were skipped (42 boards), because a repeated notice cannot be told from a coincidence at that size.

3. 3.Match

   An employer counts as stating a position when one such sentence appears in at least 40% of its postings. 46 matched.

4. 4.Exclude

   5 matches were not about hiring. They are listed below with the reason.

5. 5.Classify

   Each remaining employer was classified by reading its quoted statement and, where the posting links to one, its policy page. 12 pages were read; 3 could not be and those employers are reported as unknown. Anything an employer did not say is left blank, never inferred.

6. 6.Verify

   A script checks that every quote appears word for word in the stored text. The run fails if one does not. Shares carry a 95% Wilson interval and counts inside the employers that set rules are small, so read them as counts, not estimates for all employers.

Source documentation: Greenhouse Job Board API, Lever Postings API and Ashby public job posting API.

Matches we excluded

anaplan

The only match is a "Privacy & AI Notice" heading above a candidate-privacy link. It says nothing about AI.

cloudflare

Describes the traits it wants ("AI-native curiosity"). Not a statement about the hiring process.

deepgram

Describes what the job involves. Not a statement about the hiring process.

replit

The match is navigation text from the careers page (a list of links).

sift

The match describes the company's own product ("AI-powered fraud platform").

What this study cannot tell you

• The sample leans toward technology

  Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby are used mostly by software and internet companies. Nothing here describes hospitals, schools, government or large retailers.

• It measures what employers publish, not what happens in the room

  An employer with no statement in its postings may still have a policy on its careers site or tell candidates by email.

• The match is conservative

  A policy that appears in fewer than 40% of an employer's postings, or that does not use AI vocabulary in a hiring sentence, is missed. The true share of employers with a policy is probably higher than 13.5%.

• It is a snapshot

  Policies change quickly. This one is dated November 1, 2026.

• It is not legal advice

  Quotes belong to the employers that wrote them. Read the current policy before you rely on it.

Data and corrections